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GhostTX

MOO2 with W2K ... Can't get to work

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Win 2K w/SP3

Pentium 400Mhz

250MB Ram

4GB HD

3D Rage Pro AGP w/4MB (Desktop res at 1280x1024)

Legacy(?) audio

DirectX 8.1

 

Trying to get MOO2 to run on the box at work for lunchtime fun, but no love.

 

Launch Orion95.exe and the screen goes black for the res change, then come back to desktop and nothing happens. Desktop icons disappear and the cursor is premently set at the hourglass, though I can click on Start to reboot the system.

 

Tried setting the desktop to 1024x768 and also setting properties on the shortcut for window maximized, but nothing.

 

I read the compatibility stuff...and the only thing I got was logictech driver info, which I don't have.

 

Help!

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MOO2 = Master of Orion 2

 

 

It works fine for me, but I am on XP. Do you have the most recent patch for it? (1.31 I believe...)

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Ya...1.31 is running.

 

I'm totally at a loss...especially since the Game index indicates that others have gotten MOO2 to run on W2K.

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It may be a video card issue, as I've got a Geforce2, and I previously ran it on a TNT2. Can anyone here comment on how well it works with ATI cards?

 

Of course, make sure you've got the latest video drivers too... that's a pretty old card, so that could be your problem...

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MOO2 works fine for me on the following system:

 

Win2K

GeForce4 5900FX (128Mb)

SoundBlaster Live! X-Gamer Pro

DirectX v9.0b

 

I get sound and perfectly fine video. There are two problems:

 

1. Occasionally, DirectX spazzes out and a lot of screen elements don't render. This usually happens towards the end of the game (after many turns have passed). Solution is to save and restart MOO2, but it happens much more frequently after the first incident.

 

2. Multiplayer games are extremely slow to process a turn.

 

The first is a result of DirectX failing to provide backward compatibility... I've had this problem with other DirectX 2.0 games. The second is a problem with the ORION95 executable; it's simply badly written. Perhaps you should try up[censored] your DirectX drivers? The screen transition you are describing is to the intro video, which uses quite a lot of DirectX 2.0 functions. Also, I recommend that, if you are using the ORION95 executable, you start DXDIAG before you start ORION95 and disable DirectDraw.

 

Personally, I'm having a terrible time getting the ORION2 executable to run... the one written natively for DOS. If I could get it to work, I could get around the DirectX graphics bug and the excrutiatingly slow networking problems (as well as play on Kali). Unfortunately, Win2K does not support DOS natively and NTVDM is bad at pretending. My biggest problem is that MOO2 can't tell (from NTVDM's point of view) that my graphics card supports VESA VBE 1.2. Considering that the card is less than a year old, I should think it does. smile Anyone found any way to provide VESA VBE support to DOS programs under NTVDM?

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2K/XP have a problem with Geforce 4+ cards (and other video cards but the problem seems to affect more VESA modes with Nvidia). Access to most VESA modes isn't allowed. Simple fix for Microsoft to do but it's remain unfixed for just about forever. We identified the problem on VOGONS awhile back and serveral people have written a couple of utilities to patch Windows. Unfortunately we do not have a compatibility list for different models of graphics cards and the patch, so make sure you know how to fix your system if the patch doesn't work for you.

 

Read this thread:

http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?t=1659&highlight=vgafix

 

I'd suggest running MOO2 under Dosbox.

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